The Most Evil Secret Societies in History

by Shelley Klein

By the outbreak of the First World War, the Camorra had been all but wiped out and later, around 1922, with the arrival of Fascism in Italy, those Camorra operatives still working in Naples were quickly quashed. Benito Mussolini’s regime was not one that would tolerate organized crime. While stamping out what they saw as insurgents, the Fascists did invite certain sections of the Camorra to join their cause, but this was mainly so that they could monitor the more rural areas of southern Italy and keep them under control. Prior to Mussolini’s rise to power, one could almost have divided the country into two separate parts – the industrialized areas and cities to the north such as Milan and Genoa, and the south which still depended largely on agriculture for its main source of income. The gap widened even further after the war, with the south preferring to re-elect old politicians and stick to old ways, one consequence of which was that political corruption reasserted itself very quickly.

  In 1943, when the Allies first invaded Sicily during the Second World War, British and American undercover agents set out to make contact with certain ‘pro-allied’ forces through an intermediary known to most as Lucky Luciano – one of America’s leading Mafiosi, who at this time was serving a lengthy prison sentence back in the States for running a prostitution racket. The Allies – through Luciano – appointed several Mafiosi as mayors of a selected number of Sicilian towns, quickly allowing the Mafia to re-establish its stranglehold over Sicily as a whole. Around the same time another Mafiosi operative by the name of Vito Genovese, who had earlier left America to evade an outstanding murder charge against him, settled in Naples from where he began to operate several illegal, but highly lucrative, businesses. One such involved the misappropriation of the Allies’ supplies (particularly food), which was later sold on the black market.

  During this trial of a Camorra group in Viterbo in March 1911, the thirty-four accused men were seated in a steel cage to keep them in order. The informer sat in a separate cage for his own safety.

  But Genovese’s crimes weren’t the only ones haunting Naples and its environs during this period, for although there were no actual Camorra gangs operating within the city, the fact that the Mafia were making huge profits from their illegal activities meant that in very small ways new crime organizations began to establish themselves. The Camorra saw to it that the surrounding region of Campania, which comprised mainly farming land, fell under their direct control.

  Their influence was particularly strong in rural areas to the north and east of Naples, especially in the rich cattle area around Nola. Sometimes gangs would shoot it out for dominance in a given market; for example, sixty-one murders were committed in the Nola area during 1954-6 alone. They also intimidated farmers who refused their services or protection, normally by burning their crops.3

  By the mid-1950s the Camorra’s influence pervaded all agricultural areas, including that of milk production – a move that in real terms meant huge profits for the organization. Enjoying the steady rise in their influence, camorristi then began laying plans to extend their business practices back into Naples itself. After all, most of the produce they were handling passed through the city at one point or another, so it made perfect sense. Politically, too, the Camorra were once again making huge inroads into the fabric of Neapolitan life. One only has to look to the funeral in 1955 of one of the Camorra’s major players, Pascalone ’e Nola, to see this at work, for no less than twelve Neapolitan MPs sent wreaths. But perhaps the area in which the Camorra were going to make their biggest impression over the next several years was in the Mafia-dominated contraband industry.

  Cigarette smuggling was big business in the 1950s, as there were huge profits to be made. Initially, the main center for these operations was the free port of Tangiers in northern Africa. When this was closed in 1961, most of the warehouse operations selling cigarettes moved to the Yugoslavian coast, and Naples quickly became one of the world’s biggest cigarette-smuggling cities. Naturally, the Mafia controlled a large part of this lucrative pie, but the Camorra weren’t far behind, and soon they also became involved in the increasingly popular drug-trafficking industry. Given the large profits to be gained, this latter area inevitably resulted in a great deal of violence and internecine warfare. A notorious example of this was the slaughter of Gennaro Ferrigno (an importer of Peruvian cocaine) by Camorra boss Antonio Spavone in 1971 and, later the following year, the killing of an ex-policeman, Emilio Palamara.

  Perhaps one of the most notorious camorrista to emerge from the pile was a man by the name of Michele Zaza (often referred to by the sobriquet ‘Mad Mike’). As the son of a fisherman, Zaza came from very humble beginnings, but by dealing in illegal arms and contraband cigarettes (somewhere in the region of 5,000 tons of the stuff per year) he soon made inroads into the Neapolitan underworld, becoming one of the Camorra’s most feared leaders. He once boasted to an investigating magistrate:

  I used to load fifty thousand cases [of cigarettes] a month. I could load a hundred thousand cases, $10 million on trust, all I had to do was make a phone call […] I’d buy $24 million worth of Philip Morris in three months, my lawyer will show you the receipts. I’m proud of that $24 million.4

  For all his wealth and bravado, Zaza was part of the old-style Camorra, a secret society that was soon to be overtaken by the nuovo camorra organizzata (NCO), or New Organized Camorra, of Raffaele Cutolo. Cutolo had, for most of his adult life, lived in jail and it was from there that he built up his organization, initially befriending young inmates who were unfamiliar with, and therefore scared of, the prison system. By winning these men’s trust, Cutolo soon had a loyal following. He also befriended many inmates who were too poor to buy regular food. Another strategy Cutolo implemented was to organize payments to be made to families of those who were loyal to him inside the prison. Soon Cutolo’s NCO had hundreds, if not thousands, of members, not only within the jail where he was incarcerated, but also in other prisons dotted throughout the country. He also had groups of men and women who worked for him on the outside, in towns and cities to the east of Naples such as Ottaviano. Cutolo further distinguished himself from other Camorra leaders by harboring a fierce dislike of the Mafia and any Neapolitans whom he felt were collaborating with these Sicilian thugs. In this manner, he created an extremely loyal following, all of whom identified themselves strongly with Naples and Campania. Cutolo also established a fairly traditional set of values and rules (some of which harked back to the eighteenth-century Camorra), including one that stated children should not, under any circumstances, be kidnapped or abused. This new-style Camorra began to appeal to increasing numbers of disillusioned young men. This testimony from an NCO member describes how he first became aware of the organization:

  I was in Novara jail, and my relatives had come to see me […] when I went back to my cell and sat down on my bed I started to think that everything I had done in my life had been wrong ’cause I had never done anything which was important to me personally. Every single thing I’ve done was somebody else’s idea. I ain’t done nothing in my life. I was a peasant, and in 1978 I got arrested for extortion by mistake, but I was innocent. I went to the old Avellino jail, where I got to know certain camorristi. I thought that the Camorra was just.5

  In 1985 the football field of the Poggioreale Prison was turned into a giant court room when 640 Camorra members went on trial. Also in attendance were 300 lawyers and more than 1,000 policemen.

  The time and effort Cutolo spent on his young recruits paid enormous dividends, and he saw to it that large numbers of unemployed, disillusioned, directionless youngsters felt they had something to work towards. By the late 1970s, the NCO was the most active criminal organization in the Neapolitan district. Extortion was their main source of income, followed by cocaine. However, Cutolo was not without rivals and one such competitor proved to be the cause of his eventual downfall. The NF (nuovo famiglia or new family) was an alliance built up of all the other Camorra groups to fight against the dominance of Cutolo’s NCO, whom everyone agreed ha
d grown too powerful. Frequent battles broke out between the two factions, although it wasn’t until the early 1980s that Cutolo’s organization really began to suffer, eventually dying out altogether. This was not only down to the in-fighting, but also to the authorities who began cracking down hard on the NCO (who were more infamous and more conspicuous than the NF). Other reasons for the organization’s demise included the relative youth and inexperience of its members, which in turn meant that internal disputes usually met with one NCO killing another. Cutolo himself was also debilitated when President Sandro Pertini personally ordered that he be removed from his mainland prison and sent to a maximum-security jail on an island near to Sardinia. This was the last nail in Cutolo’s coffin, but if it spelt the end of the NCO, it certainly didn’t deter other Camorra groups from expanding their businesses and growing in influence. An earthquake that devastated the Naples area on November 23, 1980 handed the Camorra a huge opportunity to make money and further inveigle itself into Neapolitan politics and society.

  Causing almost 3,000 deaths and 9,000 injuries, the estimated number of people who were made homeless by the earthquake was between 200,000 and 300,000. Massive building programmes were required and the Camorra, who had for decades been positioning themselves within local government, were now in the ideal situation to win construction contracts, siphoning off large amounts of government money in the process. One group involved in the building scams was the Nuvoletta gang, led by the notorious Camorra boss, Lorenzo Nuvoletta, aided by his three brothers, Angelo, Ciro and Gaetano.

  Born and brought up within a farming community to the north of Naples, the young Nuvoletta boys soon joined a Camorra group led by Luigi and Enrico Maisto. In the early 1960s, however, bored with being bit-players, they decided to branch out on their own and established themselves as landowners, supplying foodstuffs to both military and government-run establishments such as hospitals. The Nuvolettas made vast amounts of money during this period, not least because they swindled several insurance companies over a variety of false claims. The money they made from this was then ploughed into the setting up of several money-lending establishments, which soon engaged most local businesses as their clients. Heroin was next on the Nuvoletta brothers’ agenda; drug smuggling being the easiest way to make vast amounts of money over a relatively short period of time.

  Building up their crime empire, of course, was not without its risks. On more than one occasion the brothers were arrested by police and charged with a variety of offences including extortion. It was also believed that, unlike many Camorra groups, the Nuvoletta gang also enjoyed strong ties with the Sicilian Mafia – often providing safe havens for those Mafiosi who were on the run from the authorities. This testament by Camorra supergrass Pasquale Galasso details how meetings were often held at the Nuvoletta brothers’ villas, at which the Mafia were frequently present:

  Our worries arose from the possibility that the police would arrive during our meetings and cause a bloodbath, yet Nuvoletta always managed to calm us down. Sometimes when Carmine Alfieri and I looked out at his farmhouse when leaving Vallesana, we saw some police cars parked outside Nuvoletta’s house. That proved to us he was well protected […] in the course of these meetings we had to sort out once and for all the tensions Cutolo had created. I can recall that Riina, Provenzano and Bagarella [all Mafiosi] were in Nuvoletta’s farmhouse at the same time.6

  Being connected to the Mafia had enormous benefits for the Nuvoletta brothers, not least because the Mafia also afforded the Nuvoletta gang protection both politically and from other Camorra organizations.

  Reaping the rewards from their many businesses, the Nuvolettas now decided to invest their capital in the ever-burgeoning construction industry, with cement factories their particular choice. After setting up their first operation in April 1979, two years later the company made almost 500 percent profit. Extraordinary as this was, the massive gains were mostly due to the 1980 earthquake. Cement was necessary in all areas of reconstruction. It was almost a licence to print money, particularly after such a major disaster. But not everything was plain sailing, for in the same year that the earthquake struck, workers in the shipyards of Castellammare, who were angered by the Camorra’s demands for protection money, mounted demonstrations throughout the summer.

  The Nuvolettas didn’t allow such a minor matter as social unrest to stand in the way of progress, and throughout the 1980s they made significant inroads into Neapolitan public life, not least when Vincenzo Agizza – a Nuvoletta gang member – was made a Christian Democrat councilor in 1980. This was just the tip of the iceberg. Many other council members and politicians were also connected to the Camorra, if not directly, then indirectly through family members. This meant that the Nuvolettas were soon in control of an international corporation with fingers in such diverse pies as the construction industry, the entertainment business, drugs, fraud, stud farming, real estate and agriculture. Still, as powerful and rich as they undoubtedly were, the Nuvolettas were not immune to attack, as was proved in 1984 when Ciro Nuvoletta was murdered by a rival Camorra group, the Bardellinos. This began a war between the two factions, which saw eight people killed and twenty-four seriously wounded. Perhaps the most notorious Camorra-related event during this turbulent period, one that illustrated the extent to which the Camorra worked handin-hand with some of Italy’s most prominent politicians, was the Cirillo affair.

  On April 27, 1981, a terrorist organization called the Red Brigade (not to be confused with the German Red Army Faction) kidnapped Ciro Cirillo (a Christian Democrat politician), killing two of his security guards and injuring his secretary. The Christian Democrats had, three years earlier, suffered the loss of another of their members, Aldo Moro, who was also kidnapped and later murdered by the Red Brigade. Knowing what was at stake, therefore, the Christian Democrats (CDs) immediately wanted to negotiate for Cirillo’s release. This brought the Camorra squarely into the picture.

  One day after Cirillo’s capture, the Italian Secret Services were granted permission to visit Raffaele Cutolo in the Ascoli Piceno prison. Present at this meeting was the Christian Democrat Mayor of Giugliano, Giuliano Granata, which indicated just how far the CDs were willing to work alongside the Camorra to negotiate the release of their colleague. In fact, the government was fully complicit in the whole affair, with the Italian Minister of the Interior, Virginio Rognoni, declaring that, ‘The Camorra could have an interest in helping to free Councilor Cirillo. Sometimes the relations between organized crime and terrorism are intertwined, other times they are separate. All possible channels must therefore be opened.’7

  In a protest against a Camorra turf war that had seen dozens killed in Naples during 2004, people lay spreadeagled in the street covered in white sheets marked with fake bloodstains to represent those who had lost their lives.

  The Camorra’s own willingness to become involved in negotiations must, as Tom Behan points out in his book on the group, have something to do with the fact that the police had deployed so many officers in the area to form checkpoints and roadblocks that the Camorra’s illegal activities were severely curtailed. The sooner the Cirillo affair ended, the sooner ‘business as normal’ could resume. To this end, Cutolo, through the prison network, made contact with his opposite number within the Red Brigade who was also serving out a long prison term, though not in the same jail. But what was Cutolo’s asking price for his involvement? How far was the government willing to go in order to secure Cirillo’s release? Cutolo himself has said (though naturally this cannot be verified) that the Christian Democrat minister, Vincenzo Scotti, allegedly arranged for Cutolo’s faction to be ‘gifted’ a substantial number of machine guns as payment.8 Cutolo was, no doubt, also hoping for an early release from prison, as well as perhaps ‘winning’ a larger share of construction contracts than his organization was managing to secure at the time. Negotiations continued until it was agreed that both the Red Brigade and Cutolo’s New Camorra were to receive large financial pay-offs
garnered from a variety of construction companies who all supported the Christian Democrats. Three months after he was kidnapped, Cirillo was released from captivity unharmed. Yet this was only the beginning of the story, for afterwards countless questions were asked (particularly by the newspapers) about the extent of the Democrats’ collusion with organized crime to secure Cirillo’s release – not to mention how much money had changed hands during their meetings.

  More disturbing than this, however, was the fact that several key players in the affair were subsequently murdered, including Antonio Ammaturo (head of the Naples Flying Squad) who was killed on July 15, 1982, Vincenzo Casillo (one of Cutolo’s chief negotiators in the affair) who was killed by a car bomb in 1983, and his partner of several years who was found dead a few months later, her body dumped in a motorway ditch.

  Eventually, a judicial enquiry was ordered to investigate exactly what had occurred both during and after the kidnapping. In conclusion the enquiry stated the following:

  In judgement it seems clear that the evidence points to an attitude on the part of leading Christian Democrats that was markedly different from that of the party’s ‘official line’; which was that of reacting with firmness to all Red Brigade blackmails and refusing all hypotheses of a negotiation or a compromise. In reality, there were members of the party who did not follow this official line but were active in various ways to obtain Cirillo’s release, turning above all to the mediation of Raffaele Cutolo and accepting negotiations with the Red Brigade.9

  With a good number of Italian politicians willing to work alongside the Camorra, this secret organization established a firm hold on Italian politics and society as a whole. Yet, unlike its Sicilian counterpart (the Mafia), which prides itself on secrecy, the Camorra’s activities are frequently not entirely covert. For the most part this is probably due to the nature of their business dealings. With contraband cigarettes, for example, the trade requires a relatively large number of people to operate smoothly, many of them in clearly visible roles.